ARLYLE'S Life of Stirling is criticised in the _Grenzboten_, which calls
Carlyle the strangest of all philosophers. This book is said, however, to
be, on the whole, clearer and more intelligible than most of his former
productions. Still, like most works of the new romantic school in England,
of which Carlyle is the chief, it aims rather to give expression to the
ideas and abilities of the author, than to do justice to its subject. But
it is in Warren's _Lily and the Bee_, that the school appears in full
bloom. This is said to consist mostly of exclamation points, and is
written in a sort of lapidary style, that deals in riddles, pathos without
object, sentimentality with irony, world-pain, and allusions to all the
kingdoms of heaven and earth, without any explanation as to what relation
these allusions bear to each other, and with a Titanic pessimism as its
predominating tone, which first rouses itself up to take all by storm, and
finishes by being soothed into happy intoxication by the odors of a lily.
This is better treatment than _The Lily and the Bee_ gets at home.

In the second volume of _Shakspeare as Protestant, Politician,
Psychologist and Poet_, by DR. ED. VEHSE--spoken of as being "even more
uninteresting than the first," we find the two following extraordinary
ideas. Firstly, that Shakspeare followed a theory of physical
_temperaments_ in his characters--that Hamlet was a representative of the
melancholy or nervous, Othello of the choleric, Romeo of the sanguine, and
Falstaff of the phlegmatic. Secondly, that in Falstaff, Shakspeare
parodied--himself! Or to give his own words, "We may suppose that
Shakspeare's physical constitution inclined to corpulence, and inspired in
him the disposition to the life of a _bon vivant_. His intimacy with the
Earl of Southampton may have favored this disposition, since they led for
a long time a dissipated tavern-life, and were rivals in love matters!"
The work is principally made up of extracts from Shakspeare's plays, to
every which extract we find appended "How admirable,"--"Excellent," and
similar aids to those who are not familiar with the English bard.

We commend to the attention of philologists Das _Gothische Runenalphabet_,
(or The Gothic Runic Alphabet,) recently published by HERTZ of Berlin.
"Before Wulfila, the Goths had an alphabet of twenty-five letters, formed
according to the same principles, and bearing nearly the same names as the
_Runes_ of